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Andy Parry's Moving Jump

By Ethan Stone

Published Wednesday May 29, 2013

Earlier this month, the Line Traveling Circus Pizza Party edit beat out a slew of raucous entries in the Orage Masters CLIP Contest to win the $5,000 prize. The video's crowning moment is the debut of a moving jump -- it's better to watch the video, above, than attempt to describe it -- that likely secured the win for the characteristically oddball Traveling Circus crew. We caught up with the jump's creator, Andy Parry, to get the inside story of this unusual stunt's skiing debut.

The idea for the moving jump wasn't mine. It was a collaborative effort among our crew, and the idea was floating around for several years prior to Orage Masters. There had been a guy on a bike who'd done a moving jump with a truck, and we thought that it might work on skis. We'd done a moving rail for a Traveling Circus episode already, so why not a moving jump?

I was given the task of organizing the T.C. crew for Orage Masters. I thought if were going to be in the Masters, we might as well make a decent showing, so I ordered a bunch of pizza costumes and coordinated the whole production. We knew we wouldn't be strong on jumps, so we figured we might as well try something different.

The day before the event I started cutting up lumber. I stole some plywood from the shed at the house we were renting. I ended up finishing the jump in the Sun Valley parking lot on the day of the event. Everyone was getting ready to go up skiing, and I was sitting there on the asphalt with Ross [Imburgia] watching me, telling me that I'm not doing a good job.

I kind of winged it. I basically made a skateboard jump out of plywood and mounted it on some old skis. We tested it a few times with a skier trying to hit it as a normal jump, with both skier and jump moving downhill, and it didn't work out so well. Someone said we should try it with the skier and jump colliding into each other. We tried it the first time during our run. We sent [the moving jump] down the landing of the first jump, and Ross stood on the lip of the second jump and skied uphill into it.

We always knew that Ross was going to be the person doing it. Ross is the daredevil of the crew. If there's a crazy idea, he's the first person you throw it at. His reaction in this case was, 'It's not going to work.'

On the first try he did half a backflip and I thought he got really hurt. But he was okay and the jump wasn't broken, so we went back and tried it again with a little less speed. I let go of the rope attached to the jump and just kept staring at Ross, and watched him flip and somehow land.

Everyone just started yelling and screaming. They were throwing pizza boxes and hugging each other. The owner of Line Skis was going around giving people high fives and saying it's one of the coolest things he's ever seen. The jump got totally destroyed. People were dragging pieces of it around.

We ended up winning the video contest by 500 votes. Everyone else had a lot more skiing and good jump tricks, and ours was just really different and weird and entertaining, and that's why we won. Plus we've got a ton of Facebook fans.

I think it's a first and last time that [a moving jump] will ever happen at Orage Masters, and potentially ever. It wasn't about winning, it was about going out and doing something that everyone will remember for a long time.

One year ago this month, the lives of a dozen or so athletes were flipped upside down when they won gold medals at the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. We check in to see what's different today.